Blurb Ganga. When she speaks, we must listen. For she is the giver of life, the oldest, kindest, wisest of mothers. She has seen this land take form, swell with power. She has witnessed people pillage it, and bring about the end to the age of kings in a great, futile war. The battle of […]

India is a land of deep cultural memory. Perhaps nowhere else in the world do people have active conversations and shape their lives around stories that have been written thousands of years ago. Mythology, for us, is not just mythology; it’s a way of life. So we’ve put together five great books that not only retell […]

Guys, I have something exciting for all of you. Many readers of this blog will know that I write – both blog posts and books – on various topics, but the one subject I keep returning to is mythology. I have a deep personal love for it. I could talk about it for hours, I could […]

The story of Achilles and Patroclus is central to the story of Iliad. It is the death of Patroclus – when clad in Achilles’s armour – that ends the feud between Achilles and Agamemnon. It is the death of his friend that ignites Achilles into action, and sets into motion a sequence of events that […]

Yesterday I wrote a post on envy. Today, even though it’s the day for ‘love and longing’, I found myself gravitating back to the same theme. In the video I shared in my last post, Parul Mathur spoke about how fiction is the best place to find envy. I figured art wouldn’t be too far […]

If you’ve already bought and read my third novel, The Winds of Hastinapur, you can nod off to sleep. (Or you could use the time you would have spent to read this post and write a customer review on the book’s Flipkart page.) But for all those of you who have not read the book […]

Last night, I was reading a re-telling of the Trojan War story by Olivia Coolidge, and I chanced upon the tale of Troilus and Cressida. This is one of the few stories in the Iliad that speaks of a woman’s betrayal of a man. The common theme in mythology is of how men use women […]

The Mahabharata is often known as the fifth Veda. It has often been said that reading the Mahabharata from start to finish will fill the reader’s mind with such knowledge and enlightenment that he is sure to achieve heaven. Whether or not that is true, the epic is a virtual forest of stories, with new […]

When we think of the phrase ‘love and longing’, we often just think of romantic love. In today’s post we’ll look at one of Greek mythology’s most famous stories – about the love of a mother for her daughter. Demeter is the Greek goddess of the harvest. If there is a mother-goddess in the Greek […]

I think it’s safe to say that marrying for love is a recent phenomenon. Traditionally, marriage has always been a coming together of two individuals with the intention of having children. Love was neither necessary nor sufficient. Things like social standing, material riches, and good genes (read beauty) mattered a lot more – not only for […]